h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have been getting a bit tired, lately - the past two days, say - with a lack of nuance.

You know the kind of thing. Talk that just will not allow for "a pinch of this and a helping of that, and two twists of this, as well". Which effectively rules out a lot of the things I have to say that are actually *worth* saying. It also leads to a lot of "would you f'n listen to what I actually said please..." - and that is one of the most tiresome things in the world.

So, where do you turn in a nuance drought? To poems, of course. To something like "The Waste Land", that you can toy with and tease with, and maybe not grasp. You can try to follow the strands of spaghetti and see where they lead, and take pleasure in the tangle. (And if you eat spaghetti, of course, it is impossible to isolate one strand and eat only that. You'll always get a mouthful of something else you never bargained for).

Maybe that's one of the things poems are for, if they have to be for anything. A fount of ambiguity and ambivalence. A well of uncertainty for those who want it. Not so much "shelter from the storm", as a doorway into the storm, out of a stultifying shelter where black is black and white is white.

And even if it's so stormy and windy that you don't manage to isolate, segregate and categorise all your strands of spaghetti, you still walk away full, with a bellyful of Bolognese.

I'm getting hungry with this talk of pasta , even after gorging on beef with ravioli.

I know what you mean about nuance in poetry. The world we live in seems uncomfortable with things that don't fit into narrow categories. You know the drill: what good is literature for students who want their education to lead them to good-paying jobs? Well, studying literature might help them learn to think about where they are in the order of things, and where they might be if they got in touch with what was inside them. Granted, a story with elderly characters ("King Lear," or "Ethan Frome") won't be easy for a teenaged student to relate to, but no one stays a teenager forever. moreover, getting a narrow education that fits you for your first job won't be much use decades down the road, when almost everything you took for granted in your teens has been replaced with something else...

I did actually enjoy studying King Lear as a teenager, but I know what you mean. I know not everyone in the class did. Some other Shakespeare plays I didn't enjoy as much.

In terms of drama, now that you mention it, I've always had a liking for Samuel Beckett and some of Harold Pinter's plays, because, again, there's the openness to uncertainty that I was talking about. Sometimes, rather than saying "here is the answer", it's quite refreshing to be able to say "What? What? I wonder what the hell *that* means. Maybe it means this, but on the other hand it could mean that..."

It's always interesting when - well, I was going to say 'when there are no right answers', but that's not quite what I meant. More that it's always interesting when there are a whole lot of different right answers!

If the answer to anything comes too easily, examine it a bit first.

You might enjoy Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice," a novel that will soon be represented by a movie in the theaters. I've read that book as well as his "Bleeding Edge," and have no idea what was going on in either story .

This is balanced by some other books that I habitually read, where the murderer is identified by the end of the book. In real life, a horrendous percentage of murders go unsolved.

No, he never did anything for me, Thomas Pynchon.